Well, Central Illinois is experiencing its worst blizzard in many a year, and I am snowbound at home, dictating bankruptcy petitions and working on my taxes. We are keeping warm and toasty at stately McClarey Manor by occasionally tossing a copy of Al Gore’s tome, Earth in the Balance, into the fireplace. This exercise in heating through book burning was caused by Gore’s latest statement that the blizzards are caused by global warming. I do have to hand it to Mr. Gore: as he claims that any extreme weather event is caused by global warming, it becomes rather hard to refute a theory that purports to cause everything weather related. However, while shoveling the rather large snow drifts that clogged my driveway, courtesy of global warming no doubt, I became rather curious about predictions in regard to environmental matters made by Mr. Gore in the past. Here is what I have found.

I could go on like this at some length, but the bankruptcy petitions and my taxes are calling my name, and the warm glow from Earth in the Balance won’t last forever. Perhaps I can have the kids scrounge up a copy or two of An Inconvenient Truth.

However, there’s nothing inconsistent or paradoxical about claiming that global warming will lead to more blizzards. According to the theory, warming leads to more and heavier precipitation. When the temperature is below freezing this takes the form of snow and ice. If global warming raises the average temperature by a few degrees, this won’t mean that temperature will never fall below freezing, and when it does fall below freezing you would expect there to be more and heavier snowfall.

Hmmm. Now of the heavier snow fall because of global warming fell in areas with serious ice pack, resulting in the accumulation of more ice in glaciers near the poles, then it might result in significant sea level reduction. This could result in the death of millions of the world’s poorest fish — many of whom live near the equator. Wealthy fish off the coast of North America may not care about this, but they should.

About twenty years ago, I read an theory that we were then simultaneously at the peak of a few naturalglobal warming cycles — one lasting several years, one lasting something like 50 years, and one lasting 500 years. The warm end of these cycles was supposed to cause calmer, kinder weather better for crops and productivity. The cool end of the cycles would produce more extreme weather of all sorts. We were currently enjoying the good end of all those cycles at once, so as we started down the back side of all of them, we would start having more hurricanes and blizzards, food production would drop, and basically life would get harsher.

His punchline was: Buy gold! I don’t remember who wrote it, but sometimes I think he was onto something.

Its good to see that you are doing your ‘workout’ by shovelling snow Don. 😉
I see on the news that Chicago is having an extreme storm, and is likely to have more over the next few days.
My daughter and son-in-law are off to Germany tomorrow on a business trip, and are firstly going to Chicago for 2 days to visit some sort of expo/conference there. NZ to ‘Frisco, the on to Chicago.

Hope the weather isn’t too bad to make their conections.

Meanwhile, the aussies in northern Queensland are having their worst hurricane since 1918 ( don’t believe the warmists that its the worst in history 🙂 ) and its caused a lot of destruction – really bad for them in QL since the devastating floods a week or so back, but they’re Ockers – they’ll handle it. 🙂

Meanwhile, in paradise (eh T. Shaw 😉 ) the weather is warm – certainly not the hottest I’ve experienced here – but the nights are very sultry and around 20 deg. C; certainly up there for night temps, but not enough to put on the aircon. The warm temps and the humidity is making the garden grow crazy – having to give away carrots, cucumbers, zucchinis, tomatoes and red onions. Hope it keeps up – just love this global warming 😉

Your daughter and her husband should be all right in Chicago. The Weather has settled down although of course they should bundle up. Right now the temperature is a balmy seven above zero which is a vast improvement over yesterday at this time when it was ten below zero.

Thankfully in the Midwest we do not have to worry about hurricanes, although twisters can make up for the lack.